Picture and table explanatory text, formatting in general

When creating a confluence page I start with a blank page. I create headings and text below it.

When I then insert a picture/table I would like to have a nice text to go with it (i.e. "Table 1. Measurement results" or "Picture 1. Test setup")

Is this possible at all?

In general I find the formatting in Confluence too much of a hassle... Why is it necessary to write all kind of codes to make the text underlined or similar, why is a buttion (like in Word) not present for more functions? Better flexibility in general would be greatly appreciated when formatting a page to my needs (making it look structured and tidy).

Hope you can point me in the right direction or even inprove on this issue.

5 answers

1 accepted

No, I do agree with you about the text under a picture. And you might be able to do that by customising the CSS for a space. I recently did this for the headings as I felt the white space was too big.

I'm no expert, but it might be possible to create a new heading that is smaller and not in bold, and use that for text under a graphic. I agree about putting graphics in tables - not a great look at all!

You should be able to customise tables using CSS too.

I'd still advise having a look through Answers for info on customising tables and exporting to PDFs. I'm sure there's info here that explains how Atlassian does it as well as info from other users about their solutions and ideas. It might be a good idea to look at the Atlassian marketplace to see what plugins 3rd parties offer for customising.

There's nothing to stop you adding a line of text under a picture or table. I do this all the time and do not find it difficult nor does it move around on the page. In my experience 99% of the formatting works 100% of the time, so I'm not sure what issues you are having that makes you feel uncertain about these things. You can also keep this text with the table by adding an extra row at the bottom of the table and putting the Figure text in that. For a picture you could put that in a two row table with the pic in one cell and the text in another

I think what this discussion comes down to is that confluence lacks specific formats for e.g. table/image captions and has no option to easily* create your own custom formats. That is a limitation compared to Word, html editors, LaTeX, FrameMaker, etc. and the only way to get around that is try to work with a combination of the included formatting options like bold, italic, underline, etc.

That can work to a certain extent but is not a "clean" solution, not failure proof, more difficult to maintain, bloats up the code, makes CSS definitions more difficult and so on...

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* You can create formats with the CSS macro and include them with the div or span macro, though.

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